I might next time. If there is a next time. If I’m going to be looking up codeheads’ asses the rest of my life, I’m not doing any more information design.
Two problems with using the open source model for your world. First, we don’t live in a post-scarcity world today, so open sourcers do need to get paid. Second, open source project are not done by guys in their basements. Open Office is supported by Sun. Linux is supported by a whole bunch of companies who have a business reason to get out from under Windows. Sure these things can get contributions from all over, but they would fall flat on their faces without some kind of support - though a foundation.
There is a big difference between the DRM we have now and what there would be in this society. DRM is for the protection of copyright today. This situation is more like patent protection. If you want a movie, only an exact copy will do. If you want an iPhone, someone can reverse engineer it and produce as many as they want without having to worry about DRM. Just like the many clones we get today.
There is going to be two significant scarce items in any such society - fame (or egoboo if you prefer.) The person who designs the item everyone wants to reproduce will get all the hot chicks or hot guys - and more importantly, will get a bunch of talented people who will work on the next project.
You might also get fame for editors and reviewers. Anyone and his brother can publish a book on the web today, for free, but the ones blessed by a publisher still get the eyeballs, in general.
Which leads to the second scarce item - time. Even if we don’t have to work, there are still only 24 hours in a day. We already have more free content than we can ever read on the web. Whoever helps people use their time more efficiently will also get fame.
I already qualified what post-scarcity means as a term of art. We’ve moved on already.
RepRap is currently looking at using bio-synthetic polymers as feedstock. Those can be engineered from waste, so while finite, hardly scarce. It’s post-scarcity, not post-finite.
No. But we can produce proteins etc from waste, too. Vat-grown steaks are not that far away. Hell, mycoprotein meats are here already.
Already addressed this - not saying post-all-scarcity, merely post-material-product-of-labour scarcity.
That’s what we’re extrapolating, ISTM. What happens when former labourers (and I mean blue-collar workers, mostly) have nothing but free time?
That’s one of the questions I’d like considered. I mean, would there be fashions in fabbed goods? Different sources with different styles?
But RepRapCo is Open Source. That changes things, like I wouldn’t consider any Linux companies to be MegaCorps, even if they are profitable companies.
Can RepRap machines that grow “meat”, though. But agreed, will still need farms.
Agreed. But will the economy supporting them still be the same as today’s?
Definitely still necessary.
When I can feed my fabber with the materials to produce next-gen solar films, small wind modules, etc, how is energy going to be a problem? Anyway, cheaper energy is a necessary condition of the post-scarcity economy, so it’s already a given.
Not everyone has your country’s Byzantine tort law. What do you do if it’s an anonymous user originating from the L5 cluster satellite outside US (or any earthbound) jurisdiction?
I find that kind of classism pretty telling. Maybe they’re uncreative now because they don’t have the opportunity to be? I’ve seen what happens when poor and homeless people here get given a camera, some telephone wire or some paints - believe me, uncreative is not in it.
And all they have to do is get the plans for a more expensive model. RepRap is about using readily-available materials anyway. There won’t be gold-plated vs plastic RepRaps, that makes no sense.
I’m sure there will be a rough transition period. That’s the kind of thing I want us to discuss. Will it be something that gives rise to a permanent disaffected underclass, or will it burn itself out in a few years?
Simple fabricators won’t change our lives much more than things like desktop publishing and digital cameras did.
Even with a true replicator that could make food and such, you still have energy limits. And possibility of making dangerous materials and weapons.
Even without energy limits or dangers, there’s a scarcity of land. I guess you could get around that if everyone sent their consciousness online or had holodecks, or the population seriously declined.
This post-scarcity needs very specific parameters to determine what it would be like.
Consider the source. msmith seems pretty much of a Social Darwinist: what, or who, is no use to the market is no use to society. In that scenario, the underclass could come to include lots of educated, literate, talented, even productive people that just made the wrong choices.
Actually, with plentiful energy ( not that hard if we go nuclear ) and replicators that can make food there wouldn’t be much of a land shortage. It’s farming that eats up most of the land we use.
But there would be a shortage of land in the places where people want to live.
Even if you can fab your own food, your own house and everything you need in life, there would still be millions of other people who want to do the same things, and in the same* place* as you. Just like today.
Maybe it will be in New York, Paris & London , just like today.
Or maybe everyone will want to live on beautiful mountainsides, or on beachfront locations.
Some places will always be more popular than others, just like today.
So there will be a pricing mechanism in place, and only the elite people who can afford to pay will be allowed to live there. Just like today…
It may be a financial elitism, just like today.
Or it may be a social elitism , just like today.
But, not mater what the specific details are,human nature will still be human nature.
Just like today.
The fact that one or two things like land use will still be somewhat scarce won’t keep society from drastically changing elsewhere. Most people in hi tech cultures spend most of their time indoors anyway.
Yeah, but everyone wants to spend time indoors in cool locales. I could definitely see the cachet of being able to live in a major city going through the roof. For instance, I live in SF. There are a lot of people around who work in Silicon Valley and commute from here because it’s cooler to live here than in San Jose. However, there are also a lot of poorer people living in the city, generally with jobs inside SF. If those jobs suddenly evaporate (I don’t think all of them will, but certainly a lot of the low-end retail positions selling cheap, manufactured goods would disappear), I don’t know that they could afford living here. So, gentrification goes through the roof.
All of that is artificial scarcity though. Anyone who chooses, who just doesn’t care could just ignore it all and live somewhere else in nice conditions. As opposed to now, where most things are innately scarce; deciding that you don’t care about, say, brand name clothes doesn’t mean you get just-as-good clothes for free.
To a certain extent. I generally believe that “poor” is the default state. If you are unable to create your own wealth through personal innovation, hard work and initiative, you need to be able to provide something of value to those who do have wealth. Otherwise you are at the mercy of people to provide you charity out of the goodness of their hearts.
It may actually be useful to define various classes in this future society and try and figure out who would be in those classes.
I’m talking about the objects created by the RepRaps. If you are going to fabricate a gold statue, you need gold. If you are going to fabricate a titanium bicycle, you need titanium. Obviously these materials are expensive and not as available to poor people.
Also, how do your fantasy RepRaps work?
Current 3D printers use a sort of polymer to bond particles together. It can’t create a solid object in a sense that the object is one homogeneous material. An object created in a RepRap has different physical properties than one created in a forge, mill or injection molding machine. So it may not be appropriate for all applications
It’s not artificial scarcity in the usual sense (that is, something that’s withheld deliberately to increase price), and I’m not sure it’s so different from designer clothing.
Let’s assume that there’s going to be a certain base cost to land in our post-scarcity world - property taxes and such. It’s pretty damn close to free to get land in the middle of nowhere, but costs go up as you get closer to cities. I’d argue that that’s fairly close to clothing - at least in most cities, if you don’t care about how you look, you can get very,very cheap clothes at charities, not to mention low-end thrift stores. My dad has worked for a couple of homeless shelters, and they always had a stock out-of-style clothes you could pick up for free.
I don’t see a difference between that and your analysis of land value by location. Basically, in either case, you’re paying more to get something that:
A) Fits you better, either physically or in lifestyle
B) Looks nicer, with all the social prestige that that entails
C) Is in better condition - presuming that the basically-free land post-scarcity needs some fixing up, even if it’s fairly easy/cheap
I don’t think either of those scarcities is particularly artificial. People will want to live close to other people, and as long as the land to do so is limited, that’s a natural supply and demand.
If you asked average people in the 1600’s what a ‘post-scarcity’ society looked like, they’d probably say if you had enough gruel to eat without having to work the fields 16 hours a day, and if everyone had their own 300 sq ft hut with good protection from vermin and the elements. That would be heaven. What more could you want? Maybe throw in some decent garments and a nice set of cooking bowls.
If you asked average people in the 1800’s what a post-scarcity society looked like, they might say if everyone had a small farm, with a fine horse for each person, decent food, some nice looking, durable clothing, and some way to eliminate the drudgery of washing clothes, dishes, and other routine maintenance. Perhaps an icebox that never needs to be replenished with ice. Indoor plumbing would be awesome.
If you asked the average person in the early 1900’s what a post-scarcity society might look like, they might say a car for everyone, a nice 1000 sq foot home, unlimited fruits and vegetables, and access to good dental care and medicine for everyone.
If you had asked Karl Marx if the worker’s paradise would be upon us when everyone has a home with air conditioning, central heat, television, easy transportation, and access to good education and health care, I’m sure he’d have said yes.
Today, people living at the poverty line have standards of living far beyond what anyone could even have imaginged until maybe 100 years ago. They can have computers, a car, television, internet, all forms of other entertainment, access to cheap fruits and vegetables from around the world, cheap clothing that is nevertheless more colorful, comfortable, and longer lasting than the garments kings wore 100 years earlier.
In the 1950’s, the average middle class home was under 1000 square feet. Today, it’s closer to 2000. The average household has more than one television, more than one computer, more than one bathroom. They have access to unlimited free entertainment on the internet, in public parks, access to free books at public libraries, telephones in their pockets to stay in instant contact with anyone in the world,
Is there any sign that people are happy enough with that they have? Has upward mobility stopped or slowed down because the poor realize they’ve really got enough? Nope.
Fruit used to be luxury for the rich. Today, everyone can afford it. Does that mean people are happier or more content? If buying fruit represented a day’s wage 100 years ago, do people choose to work a day less today now that they can buy the same fruit for half an hour’s labor?
The nature of mankind is to always want more. To strive to be better, to improve your lot and that of your children. If common goods become so cheap they are essentially free, the rich will want their own private islands or they’ll take up all the beautiful real estate spots, and the average person will begin to feel that they will not be happy until they too have access to such prime real estate.
Here’s another example of the nature of humans - how come billionaires still work? They can have pretty much everything they want, and always will. They are wealthy enough for their children and grandchildren to never have to worry about money. So why don’t they quit and spend the rest of their lives sniffing the roses? For that matter, why do any of you who make more than 100K or so keep working hard to earn more? Why don’t people who are reasonably well off seek to work part-time and have more relaxation time?
There will never be a post-scarcity society. The things we value will change, for sure. But we will always want more than we have.
I’ll come right out and say I don’t believe in a post-scarcity society.
People want two things in life: a. what other people have; b. what other people might get.
We will have scarcity at the center of life as long as human nature gets anything at all out of Schadenfreude; as long as competition relishes the other guy losing as much as it does winning; as long as little kids play keep-away and there is one economist left arguing the zero-sum theory. People are going to search tirelessly for scarcity, make scarcity if they have to, and enrich themselves - and others - through it. And always, always, at someone’s expense.
Every winner creates a loser. Someone always has to go home with less than they came with, get sand kicked in their faces, or get ruined. We’ve been doing it so long, there is no other way.
Ah, I see - well, I hardly think luxury goods are the best end-points defining post-scarcity. Like I said, it’s not post-al-scarcities.
Not all - some use extrusion of a polymer itself to form the object. It’s as solid as something milled from a piece of the same plastic.
True. But there are also computerised milling, cutting, etc, machines, which a next-gen fabber can also produce.
I’m not saying a next-gen fabber can turn out every product a consumer would need. What I am saying is that a next-gen fabber would enable the means of production to be orders of magnitude cheaper.